Tag Archives: Cowboy Scat

Usual Rubbish

Readying.

The studio is stuffed to the gills already. Yes, it has gills! How do you think it breathes underwater? Didn’t you go to grammar school? Oh, right.

Sometimes I forget that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) isn’t an undereducated human like myself. He is, in fact, a mechanical man. Much must be explained to him, and what can’t be explained must be programmed in by force, if necessary. That’s the lot of a robot assistant, I’m afraid. Work, work, work.

Anyhow… the quintessential American holiday is now over. (We also survived that day that comes before Black Friday … what do they call it? Thanksgiving?) Time to fold up the balloons, disassemble the parade floats, and send the marching bands marching home. While many find the Macy parade enjoyable, it is not a simple matter to serve as the end point of that annual extravaganza. Just finding enough space to store deflated Spiderman is proving more challenging than you might imagine. Sure, without air in his ass, he’s smaller, but – and this is important – not all that much smaller. And then there’s those freaking Smurfs.


As you can imagine, every nook and cranny in the mill is stuffed with gear from the parade. You can hardly turn around in the studio these days. Still, we press on. Matt and I did a couple more mixes for Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick this past week. Gonna be a bit hard with all these deflated balloons lying around, but we’ll manage. Fortunately, many of Rick’s songs are country-like numbers, so the mixing is fairly simple. We take a naturalist approach – not too much FX, not too much compression. Just record it clean, mix it pure, and pour it into a tall, clear glass to check for impurities before quaffing it down. Pure audio ambrosia, that’s what I’m talking about. Sure ding.

We’re also furiously preparing for the holiday episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. Last year raised the bar a bit – two hours of pure horseshit. Not sure how to top that without a bigger shovel, but we’ll try.

Usual Rubbish

Songageddon.

Are you all right? You sure? Good, good. Yeah, we’re okay. Head above water, you know. Always a good thing.

Oh, sorry. I was just on the phone with Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, who wisely chose this week to travel to Madagascar for a conference on … I don’t know, monster-making best practices, something like that. Good time to leave, what with the hurricane and all that. Up here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, we implemented our disaster preparedness plan. Basically that involves closing the windows, drawing the curtains, and blocking our ears. Occasionally someone lights a candle. (When it comes to disasters, we’re not good.)

Fortunately, the gods of rock and water were smiling down upon us this past Monday-Tuesday. That monster storm took an extreme left hook and missed us clean, somehow. Not that you could tell that was the case by looking at this Hammer Mill. It appears as though it’s been through hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and pestilence. (Some would argue we qualify as pestilence, but what do they know? Them and their stinking badges.) One could hardly imagine how this place would handle high winds and higher water, and here we are on the banks of the mighty Mohawk River, just waiting to get clobbered.

We didn’t have anything like a hurricane party. Still working on our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Matt and I have been mixing for the most part over the last few weeks, but this week we worked on a new Rick song, possibly the closer for the album. To my count, that makes about 47 Rick Perry songs written and recorded over the past year. (That may be a little high, but then…. so are you, most likely. That’s right – I’m looking at YOU, stoner!) If you want to do your own unofficial census, just play back some of our podcast episodes from the last year. We’ve been posting rough drafts since last September or so – half-recorded songs, to be embellished later. Why do this? Input! We want to hear from you. (That’s right, stoner … I’m talking to you…)

Hope you got through the storm in one piece. I’d better get back to Mitch. Don’t want to keep him on hold too long, or he might invent something dangerous.

Usual Rubbish

There is a town.

Well it’s been a while. Time to open up the old mailbag, right? Right, then, right!

Here’s a little missive from alert listener Ozymandius Lake in southern Nevada, somewhere near the Arizona border. (“No fixed address” is a strange name for a street, but anyway…)

Dear ignorant buggers,

It is manifestly obvious to me, Ozymandius Lake, that you people are a bunch of frauds. Stinking, lousy frauds! I may have no fixed address, but that doesn’t mean I’m gullible. You don’t live in the Cheney Hammer Mill! That place was knocked down decades ago. And even if it hadn’t been, it was hardly large enough to accommodate everything that you claim happens there. And that Rick Perry album you’re producing – there ain’t no such thing. I’ve been living in these bottoms for nigh onto twenty years, and I ain’t never seen no Rick Perry album.

Yours respectfully,

O.L.

Well, Ozymandius – taking your last comment first – I would have to say, “look upon my works and despair”, because there is indeed a Rick Perry album on the way, Big Green is indeed producing it, and it is called Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. If you received our podcast out there in Nevada (I think we have a repeater in Reno), you would know that’s true. As for the mill, if it doesn’t exist, I’ve been sleeping in the street for the last ten years. Could explain a lot. I’ll look into it. Thanks, Oz!

Here’s another one, this from Polly (Esther) Batson in Paolo Alto, California…

Dear Big Green,

You haven’t said anything about Big Zamboola in months. Did he return to his home solar system, or is he just lurking quietly in the the cloistered basement of the mill, keeping his titanic gravitational forces to himself?

Best,

Polly

Thanks for the letter, Polly. Didn’t know people wrote letters anymore in this age of Twitter, Facebook, blah blah blah. Anywho, no worries about Big Zamboola. He has kept quiet, true, over the past year or so, mainly because he shares with sFshzenKlyrn, our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, that transcendental quality of being an gaseous entity of no determinate shape or density. Sometimes he just pops up out of nowhere, like a jack in the box. Zamboola in the box, we call him.

Okay, back to the non-existent studio with me to work on that non-existent album. If only I had known of its insubstantial nature before I started working on it!